Imagine, for example, if instead of a lot of political posturing and politeness, my vendor just told me straight up that my ideas were dumb and suggested better ones instead.  It’d take bravery on the part of the vendor to tell me the truth, and maturity on my part to not be insulted and dismiss the critical feedback.

Am I wrong to want the world to change?  I’m probably just being too much of an idealist. 

The reality is that these cases highlight the flaw in the default privacy level set by social networking sites today – especially Twitter, where it seems like most people don’t realize that anyone can view your posts unless you lock it down, and that if your friends don’t also lock their feeds down, their replies to you would be visible to the world.

I do believe, though, that operational transparency in the enterprise is a great way to give employees the opportunity to serendipitously discovery the information that might make the deal, save the day or otherwise make the company successful. (I love that phrase, so I’ll repeat it: “serendipitous discovery”.)

So while social transparency on a very personal level is probably going too far, there is a benefit to be had by keeping your co-workers in the loop on what you’re busy working on.

Come to think of it, the one person who comes to mind who tends to be very transparent and open about himself is Howard Stern.  I’m not so sure that’s worked out in his favor over the long run.  He’s famous, but it seems like it’s taken a pretty hard toll on his personal life.

In case that was way too complicated for you to understand, here’s my web 2.0 business plan in three easy phases:

This was pretty much the plan for everyone from Digg to FriendFeed, Twitter to Facebook.  And despite the obvious flaw of not really having a phase two, these companies still exist and are still fully operational.  Granted, several web 2.0 companies have entered the deadpool (Pownce, for example), but a lot of the ones you might have thought would be dead and out of money by now are still up and running, which is pretty darned amazing considering that they lack any publicly known business plans.

Twitter is already trying to figure out exactly what their business plan is, and in fact they’ve recently hired someone to help them figure out how they’ll make money – Twitter recently hired Kevin Thau who hails from past ventures Buzzwire and Openwave.  It’s hard to imagine what Twitter might do even just to cover what are likely to be increasingly expensive costs to run and maintain their infrastructure.

But that doesn’t explain one small, minor detail that I still can’t figure out: how is it that these companies got any VC funding without presenting any real business plans?  And furthermore, why is it that companies like Yammer, Present.ly and even IBM are taking concepts directly from Twitter and already making real money on them before Twitter ever even turns over a single dime?  I’m not criticizing these companies for creating similar functional offerings – to the contrary, the fact that they seem to have a good business a plan speaks highly of their possible futures.

Upon reflection, I think it’s probably wrong of me to include Facebook in the list of web 2.0 startups that don’t really have a solid business plan.  I do believe they had always intended to advertise to their users, and that they could do this more effectively by selling ad space on profiles that matched demographics that their marketers are after.  I had also written last month that I do believe they have enough momentum going to find a steady revenue stream before going under.

But that doesn’t explain what Twitter, Digg or FriendFeed or similar services will do if the costs of running their infrastructure outpace their funding.  They’re all great tools to share and discover content (and generate endless memes), but if push came to shove I think I could probably give up most of them and rely on Facebook to provide the same or similar functionality.

That’s enough for now.  I’d better get back to enjoying my favorite web 2.0 sites while they last.

I started thinking about this more today, and I came up with what I believe is a more or less accurate picture of the high-level areas of social computing, or for lack of a better term, the community platform:

So, what’s in a community platform?  Let’s take a look…

Knowledge Management

• Sharing: the ability for users to upload, tag and rate content, the ability to broadcast what you are working on (activity feeds)
• Discover: the ability for users to browse content that others have submitted or rated highly, or the ability to search content

Social Computing

• Discuss: user-driven blogging, and SMS-integrated micro-blogging, along with email-integrated threaded discussion boards
• Collaborate: the ability to check-in and check-out shared documents (usually the common office formats: DOC, XLS, PDF), and keep a revision history, as well as simple and fast rich text editing (wikis)

Social Networking

• Profile (Reputation): a representation of who you are, what you know, and what you have contributed to the community
• Network: the ability to connect with other users in the system, create private working groups, and maintain different scopes of visibility into the activities of others

The funny thing about this picture is that these high-level concepts are the same ones that have been around for many years.  For example, a typical bulletin board system from the early 1990s would’ve offered these same kinds of features.  Sharing?  Sure – you could upload and download files.  Remember the ZModem protocol, anyone?  How about Discover?  Yep, search was a part of the best file sharing parts of a BBS.  How about Discussions or Collaboration?  Well of course, and there was even FIDOnet.  You could check-in documents into the file repo and keep track of versions.  Sure, it was all over a terminal window, but it was still a community platform.  What about profile (reputation) and networking?  Well, those pieces weren’t quite as solid.  Bulletin board systems had some notion of a profile, but you really couldn’t add people that you were "friends" with, and there was no notion that your profile was hidden to everyone except your friends.